right, it isn't. I don't think Victor killed Reuben any
more than you do. And you're wondering if I think
what happened to Reuben out there at Hillside Cemetery
--if I think that was justice."
"Something like that," I agreed. "That's part of it.
And if you do, why?"
It struck me that there were a hundred other things
Wade could have been doing, and that I could have
closed up Victor's house myself. He just hadn't wanted
me to have to do it alone.
"Let's go home," he said, "have a drink, just the
two of us in peace and quiet at the kitchen table."
"That sounds wonderful." But Wade's face was
stony.
"And I'll tell you," he finished, "a story about justice."
When Sam was a little boy, he peered curiously
at the pages of the storybooks I read
constantly to him. But no matter how often
or patiently I pointed at the words and pronounced
them, or sounded them out for him, he
couldn't learn to read.
What he liked were jumble puzzles. Every morning
starting when he was seven or so, he seized the comic
pages, located the anagram puzzle and solved it speedily
and triumphantly. Some of the words in the puzzles
were really rather difficult, but not for Sam. Yet he
couldn't decode the simplest printed sentence, a trouble
that frustrated us both.
Later I learned that the wiring in his brain was a
tiny bit scrambled. His perception problem was such
that if the letters of a word were presented to him separately,
or in jumbled fashion, he could sort them, but if
they came at him all at once or in proper order, he
couldn't.
Now, sitting alone at the kitchen table in my old
house in Maine, I thought about another little boy with
the improbable name of Boxy Thorogood. He'd had a
reading problem, too, Wade had told me; Wade himself
had been a teenager at the time, but he'd heard his
mother and Mrs. Thorogood discussing it.
Boxy's real problem, though, had been more serious.
A lot more serious.
On the table before me lay that dratted Ouija
board, which Sam and Tommy kept moving in and out
of the dining room. Idly, I fingered the planchette.
Wade hadn't remembered why Reuben Tate had
taken such a harsh view of Boxy. A foolish reason, he
said, or no reason at all. It didn't matter. What mattered
was that Reuben would do something to Boxy, to
hurt him. All the boys knew it; Boxy did, too. They just
didn't know what or when.
An only child, fatherless, skinny and small for his
age, the boy spent weeks trying to avoid his nemesis.
But each night after supper, Boxy's mother--a good
woman, but she had her habits--sent him for a pack of
Pall Malls and a half-pint of Seagram's, brooking no
argument if Boxy tried getting out of the errand.
So poor Boxy rode his bicycle down Washington
Street fast, night after night, knowing that sooner or
later Reuben Tate was going to be there to pounce on
him. He could run, but he couldn't hide; it wouldn't
end until Reuben got whatever cruel pleasure he
wanted. Reuben always did.
Then one day Reuben took Wade aside, and some
of the other boys, too. "Boxy," he said, a weird grin
spreading on his face. He took a roll of high-test fishing
line from his pocket, showed it around.
"Boxy," he repeated, and giggled. He was sixteen,
then. Wade was seventeen, and the other boys were
around that age, too.
Boxy Thorogood was maybe eleven, the same age
Sam was when I found him one afternoon in his bedroom,
sobbing. The teacher, he said, had called him
stupid. Anyway:
None of the boys who heard Reuben threaten
Boxy said anything to their parents, or to any adult.
They didn't tell Boxy, either. It was hard to explain,
Wade said, but somehow they didn't think Reuben
would really do it. It didn't seem ... real.
It got real, though, the next night as Boxy flew
down the hill on his bike. Someone had stretched a
length of high-test fishing line from one side of the
street to the other.
At the speed Boxy was traveling, the fishing line
was almost a guillotine.
"He flew off the bike," Wade reported, "hit the big
brick building at the far side of Water Street, bounced
off, landed on the sidewalk."
The building that Paddy had turned into a design
studio years later. Wade didn't see the attack, he had
added, but plenty of people did: not who'd done it, but
the result. Wade hadn't found out until the next morning.
When he got up, his parents were over at Boxy's
house already, trying to take care of Boxy's mother.
"It happened," Wade finished, "because I didn't
tell what Reuben was planning."
He looked at me. "So when you talk about justice,
keep Boxy in mind. It's why some people think the
only thing wrong with what happened to Reuben is, it
didn't take long enough."
He got up and put his hand on my hair. I reached
up and held it tightly, understanding now precisely the
depth of Reuben Tate's evil, what it had done to Wade
and would go on doing as long as he lived.
"You weren't drinking at La Sardina because you
knew he was around," I said. "You didn't want to
be ..."
"Yep. Don't want a buzz on, I see Reuben. Clear
head, plenty of self-control." He sighed deeply. "It's
the only way."
He spoke as if Reuben were still alive. "And you
didn't tell, afterwards? About Reuben and Boxy?"
His hand slipped away. "I did. The others, too. But
Reuben denied it, said we were all liars who had it in
for him, and the fact was, no one had seen him do it.
There was no proof. In the end, nothing happened to
Reuben."
The refrain was getting familiar. "Well, something's
happened to him now. Thanks for telling me
why you're not sorry. I wouldn't be, either."
It was very late. Wade hesitated. "I never told that
story before," he said finally, looking a little startled
and perhaps a shade sorry at the realization that, irrevocably,
now he had.
I thought about how I might feel, as opposed to the
idea of how I ought to. "And you'd like to be alone a
little while?" I asked. "Get used to the idea?"
His face cleared, and the look he gave me was
warmer than any embrace. "Go on," I said, "try to get
some sleep. I'll be up in a while."
Moments later I'd heard him going upstairs. I
don't know how long I sat there at the table after that,
thinking about justice and wondering what was in
Reuben's heart, at the end. And about what Terence
Oscard had said about evil: that in time it begins to
seem normal.
"Mom?"
Sam's voice startled me; coming to myself, I saw
that my hand was moving the planchette on the surface
of the Ouija board, sliding it in short arcs.
Sam stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas,
milk glass in his hand.
"Need a refill?" AEDAAA, my hand spelled out
meaninglessly; EEDDDAAADDD. An idle motion, like
worrying a cuticle or twisting a lock of hair.
"Yeah. Didn't know you were here. What'cha doing
with that?" He opened the refrigerator.
"Nothing. Just fidgeting. Sitting here thinking."
"Uh-huh." He frowned at me, pouring the milk.
"That thing only works with two people, I thought. Or
more. Isn't that what you told me?"
"That's what I've heard." The board's surface was
smooth and somehow relaxing under my hand. The
sliding helped me to think.
"So why," Sam asked quietly, "does it keep on
saying that?"
"Saying what?" I asked innocently, and then I saw
it. But of course Sam had spotted it first, the anagram
over and over:
DEAD DEAD DEAD.
The next morning Ellie and I drove past the
lot where the Eastport railway depot once
stood. In the nineteenth century the town
had been a hub of shipbuilding and commerce:
its society as stratified as Boston's, its culture
refined, its fads as intense and frivolous. Spiritualism--
seances, mediums, and so on--had enjoyed a heyday
here, for example, in the 1890s.
"I have no idea," I confessed, "what to think of
it." The Ouija board, I meant. The moment I'd seen
what it was spelling, it had gone motionless.
In the vacant lot, bindweed and wildflowers had
taken over the place where whalebone-corseted ladies
had stood on the rail platform, supervising imperiously
their trunks being transferred from wagon to baggage
car, while the great steam engine took on water and its
firebox expelled glowing cinders. When Franklin D.
Roosevelt was felled by polio at his summer place on
Campobello, it was from Eastport that he began the
sad journey home: to war, and into a pair of leg braces.
"I don't see," Ellie replied, "why you should think
anything of it at all."
Now the once-massive roundhouse foundation was
a circular patch of cracked concrete, grown through by
asters. At its edges you could still find clinkers from the
locomotives' fireboxes.
"After all," she continued reasonably, "just because
a thing produces words doesn't mean it's got
anything to say."
Which I thought was a little beside the point. But
her brisk commonsense tone eased my mind somewhat,
and it was a brilliant day: the sun shining, white popcorn
clouds scudding across the blue sky, waving fields
of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod so lovely you forgot
all about hay fever.
Ellie turned onto County Road, heading south
toward Sodom's Head and the water. Just before the
road slanted down to the old salt works, she made a
sharp right; moments later we were driving along the
coveside, past a few small dwellings interspersed with
unkempt pastures and abandoned cellar holes.
"I hope Mike Carpentier's got something to say." I
braced myself against the dashboard as Ellie stopped
suddenly for a pair of eiderducks waddling across the
road. When they had passed she shoved the Jeep grindingly
into gear again and trod on the gas.